SU women's basketball team beefs up schedule to get off the bubble

Dennis Nett / The Post-StandardAs Syracuse women's basketball coach Quentin Hillsman enters his sixth year at the helm, he will be aiming to return to the NCAA Tournament for only the second time.

In his first five seasons, Syracuse women’s basketball coach Quentin Hillsman has compiled a 98-65 record, including a gaudy 50-21 mark over the past two years.

But something has been missing. Mainly, invitations to the NCAA Tournament.

Only once — in his second season — has Hillsman led a team to the tournament. The past two years his teams have been snubbed and demoted to the Women’s NIT specifically for having weak non-conference schedules. SU’s strength of schedule numbers placed in triple digits the past two seasons (101 in 2009-10 and 114 last year, despite playing top-10 teams Ohio State and Baylor).

On the cusp of a new season that starts Sunday with a 1 p.m. Carrier Dome date with Long Beach State, Hillsman hopes that issue has been answered. He has scheduled five non-conference games with teams that finished with RPIs in the top 81 last year, including perennial powers Xavier (10) and Oklahoma (18). The others are BYU (59), Arizona (67) and St. Francis, Pa. (81).

Adding to the strength of schedule factor, only the St. Francis game will be at home, as the Orange will take on the other opponents at tournaments in Hawaii and Las Vegas, as well as traveling to Idaho for a matchup with Boise State.

“Our goal is getting to the tournament, so I listened to them,” Hillsman said of NCAA Tournament selectors who left SU on the wrong side of the bubble the past two years. “I think they’ve gotten caught up with us not playing on the road. So, I’ve listened.”

Hillsman, however, also offered insight into the difficulty his program has had in scheduling games with top teams from major conferences in recent years. Many of those, he said, won’t schedule home-and-home contests with the Orange.

“BCS teams, they don’t want to come here and play us because it’s tough to play here,” Hillsman said. “They want us to come there and play, but they don’t want to return. That’s not how the thing works here. If we go to a BCS school, and they’re not paying us a guarantee, you return the game. But we don’t get that.”

One of the few exceptions to that situation occurred last year, when a then-undefeated, sixth-ranked Ohio State played in the Carrier Dome — and was upset by the Orange 75-66 — two years after SU was edged by the Buckeyes in Columbus.

“With Ohio State, we took a year off and then they came back,” Hillsman said. “We almost didn’t get that back because of the dates.”

One reason Syracuse has had difficulty arranging home-and-homes is that the program has just started to make a name for itself after years of being a Big East doormat. But it still doesn’t carry the cache of such powers as Tennessee, Stanford, Baylor and Texas A&M — and SU draws woeful crowds (hundreds vs. thousands) in comparison to those schools.

To meet such teams in early season games, Hillsman said, SU must travel to holiday tournaments. This year, the Orange will play Arizona and BYU in Hawaii (Dec. 2-3), and Xavier, Oklahoma and Ohio University in Las Vegas (Dec. 18-20).

“To get BCS schools to play against, we have to go to these tournaments and depend on these tournaments to get BCS schools,” he said.

Lacking that, SU is left to fill its non-conference slate with mid-majors — most of which are willing to travel to the Carrier Dome — and then to rely on being competitive in the ever-tough Big East Conference to boost its final RPI and SOS numbers to acceptable levels.

“All we can do is schedule teams that will play us and try to get a balanced schedule,” Hillsman said.